Portland startup pioneers a hat to secure implants for deaf children
Courtesy / CoAmplify
CoAmplify's Safe & Snug Winter Hat features a pocket on each side to snugly hold magnetically attached devices used with cochlear implants in deaf children.
CoAmplify is a Portland-based startup seeking to give deaf kids "the freedom to just be kids," starting with a winter hat designed to hold cochlear implants in place.
It aims to take that mission to the next level through a partnership with Advanced Bionics, a Swiss-owned, cochlear implant manufacturer based in Valencia, Calif. It recently began making CoAmplify's Safe & Snug Winter Hat available through its sales network and online store.
The collaboration comes three years after Meghan Carey and her husband, Sean Wilkinson of Might & Main, launched CoAmplify with a pocketed fleece bomber-style hat Carey designed to secure magnetically attached cochlear implants in infants and toddlers.
The first one was created out of necessity for their then one-year-old son, Percy, who was born deaf and hears with implants, which use magnets to transmit sound.
"You don't hear with your ears, you hear with your brain," Carey explained. As she discovered with Percy, magnets for babies are intentionally weak to prevent injury but aren't very compatible with winter outerwear.
"I would either have a cold baby who can hear me or a warm baby who cannot," she said. "Every time we put a hat on his head the magnets would fall off, and he didn't have the language to communicate that."
Working with her mom, Carey created a hat with a pocket on each side to hold the magnetically attached devices in place, then later decided to help other families by bringing the product to market under the name Safe & Snug Winter Hat, which has a patent pending.
A local maker modified the pattern and is now producing the hat, which is designed for kids ages 9 months to 24 months.
The niche market has strong potential, with two to three out of every 1,000 children in the United States born with a detectable level of hearing loss in one or both ears, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
To get her business off the ground, Carey teamed up with a mentor through the Maine Center for Entrepreneurs' Top Gun program in spring 2018, then raised a little more than $20,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to fund the initial product run.
The Safe & Snug Winter hat retails for $35 on CoAmplify's website. It also sells a set of wooden animal toys for use by speech pathologists working with deaf children.
Corri O'Brion, a teacher for the deaf who has worked closely with Percy, said that the hat gave him more freedom in his access to sound and added, "I'm certain other children and families will beneift from the same."
Just the beginning
Carey says she has ideas for numerous other products, including a sun hat and a bicycle helmet for children and adults, and underscores that the partnership with Advanced Bionics is still in the very early days.
During the pandemic CoAmplify has added device-friendly face masks for children and adults, and a headband with buttons that attach to face masks to keep pressure off of kids' ears.
"We're hoping that by the time we come to market with more broad product solutions, that we're already an established name," she said.
Carey been more focused on her business over the past year after losing her job as a stationery designer mostly working on wedding invitations, calling CoAmplify her "passion project."
Former Top Gun mentor Michael Royals, now living in Colorado, told Mainebiz that he was impressed by Carey's venture as a "personal thing," and said they had talked early on about how to approach companies about partnering.
They also spoke about potential exit strategies, and he's optimistic about CoAmplify's long-term growth potential.
With many successful startups, he said, "usually there's a beautiful confluence of purpose, individual and opportunity, and this seems to be one of them. These days people care about the story, and she has a compelling story."
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